It’s not over till the slim lady sings

Deborah Voigt’s row with Covent Garden rumbles on, but she’s back there soon and at the Barbican next weekend

It is April 6, and I am facing a disgruntled-looking Deborah Voigt in her New York apartment. The American soprano hit the headlines in 2004 when she revealed in an interview that the Royal Opera had cancelled her appearances in a revival of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos - one of Voigt's trademark operas - because her then-hefty physique would not fit into the little black cocktail dress that the costume designer had provided for the heroine.

The revelation provoked uproar around the world, especially in Voigt's native America, where larger-than-life opera stars have always found greater acceptance in the huge, 3,000-seat (or more) lyric theatres. The row died down, but on April 4 it was reignited when Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera's music director, announcing that Voigt would return to sing in the same production of Ariadne next season (June 2008), described her account of the incident as "a bunch of